Meth labs making comeback in Mankato area

Drug laws passed in 2005 made it more difficult for Joe Citizen to buy Sudafed at Walgreens, but they also did a good job of cracking down on meth labs around the country. Now a report out of Mankato says new methods of cooking meth have led to a resurgence in meth labs there.

As veteran drug agent, Ginger Peterson, of the Minnesota River Valley Drug Task Force, told KTOE News, a new way to make meth, dubbed "shake n bake," makes it "a whole new ballgame, where you can actually manufacture methamphetamine in a two liter bottle in approximately 30 to 45 minutes, have your finished product, and ready to go."

Peterson told the station that the task force has gone from seeing zero meth labs three years ago to four to six already this year. Read the full story here.

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The argument for controlled burns of forest fires is largely about regrowth. A year ago the U.S. Forest Service came under fire for its handling of the Pagami Creek fire of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, after changing conditions fueled the fire to the worst the state had seen in 93 years. MPR has a slideshow on regrowth in the area, a year later. It’s a story in pictures, all about green shoots.

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And this nugget from the Strib's opinion pages is worth a read. Sewers, admittedly, are not the sexiest of topics, but what would we do without them. Jeremy Dennison, a policy fellow at Minnesota 2020, a state think tank, makes the case to invest now in our aging infrastructure.

“In Minneapolis and St. Paul, 70 percent of wastewater collection systems are older than 50, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. In Duluth, some wastewater lines are as old as 120. More than 30 percent of greater Minnesota's underground sewage infrastructure is older than 50.”